until 1 December 1889. Bunce next became the commanding officer of Naval Station New London in New London, Connecticut, on 12 February 1890. On 30 June 1890, he took command of both Training Station Newport in Newport, Rhode Island, and the training ship stationed there, the sloop-of-war . His next assignment, as a member of the Board of Inspection and Survey, began on 21 August 1894. Promoted to commodore on 1 March 1895, he relieved Rear Admiral Richard W. Meade III as commander-in-chief of the North Atlantic Squadron on 27 June 1895. North Atlantic Squadron Since its creation in November 1865, the North Atlantic Squadron had received the U.S. Navy's newest ships and latest equipment, and its commanders-in-chief had the closest relationship with and access to the Department of the Navy's senior leadership in Washington, D.C., of any U.S. Navy squadron commander; both factors made commanding it a plum assignment for senior U.S. Navy flag officers late in their careers. However, like all U.S. Navy squadrons of the nineteenth century, it generally had operated as an administrative command arranging logistics for and coordinating the independent movement of its ships, which operated individually rather than as integrated components of a naval formation trained to operate as a cohesive unit during combat against an enemy fleet; moreover, the squadron's ships generally were poorly designed for such tactical cooperation, and many U.S. Navy officers of the era preferred to operate independently when in command of a ship. Efforts to exercise the squadron as a single combat unit, notably in 1874 and 1886, began to lay the foundation for change but had proved abortive or had limited success in the face of the priority for the squadron's ships to perform individual missions in support of American business interests in the Caribbean, American fishing rights off eastern Canada and the then-separate Dominion of Newfoundland, and U.S. Navy public relations goals in visits to American cities along the East and Gulf coasts of the United States. Bunce believed that modernization of the U.S. Navy required it to develop a true capability to operate its ships effectively in tactical formations, and he took command of the North Atlantic Squadron at a time when it finally had acquired ships designed for tactical squadron operations and had begun to develop a true identity as an operational squadron. His predecessor, Rear Admiral Meade, had taken advantage of political quiet in